This was not a
political statement of posturing, given the current cool relations
between the U.S. and Russia over the Ukraine. As it turns out, Russia’s
food security is light years ahead of the U.S.

A significant portion of the Russian population own
“dachas,” or seasonal garden homes, where they can grow their own food.
At the height of the communist era, it is reported that these dachas
produced 90% of the nation’s food. Today, with the land now privatized,
they still comprise about 40% of the nation’s food.

Compare that
with the United States, where less than 1% of the population controls
the food, and small-scale family farms have for the most part been
bought out by huge Biotech corporations.

While many in
the world are completely dependent on large scale agriculture, the
Russian people feed themselves. Their agricultural economy is small
scale, predominantly organic and in the capable hands of the nation’s
people. Russians have something built into their DNA that creates the
desire to grow their own food. It’s a habit that has fed the Russian
nation for centuries. It’s not just a hobby but a massive contribution
to Russia’s agriculture.

In 2011, 51% of
Russia’s food was grown either by dacha communities (40%), like those
pictured above in Sisto-Palkino, or peasant farmers (11%) leaving the
rest (49%) of production to the large agricultural enterprises. But when
you dig down into the earthy data from the Russian Statistics Service you
discover some impressive details. Again in 2011, dacha gardens produced
over 80% of the countries fruit and berries, over 66% of the
vegetables, almost 80% of the potatoes and nearly 50% of the nations
milk, much of it consumed raw.

Food
sovereignty puts the people who produce, distribute and eat food at the
centre of decisions about food production and policy rather than
corporations and market institutions that have come to dominate the
global food system. In 2003, the Russian government signed the Private Garden Plot Act into
law, entitling citizens to private plots of land for free. These plots
range from 0.89 hectares to 2.75 hectares. Industrial agricultural
practices tend to be extremely resource intensive and can damage the
environment. 70% of global water use goes to farming, and soil is eroded
10 to 40 times faster.

"Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal. For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more--always more--even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have."

It is no secret that capitalism thrives off exploitation. It needs a
large majority of people to be completely reliant on their labor power.
It needs private property to be accessible to only a few, so that they
may utilize it as a social relationship where the rented majority can
labor and create value. It needs capital to be accessible to only a few,
so that they may regenerate and reinvest said capital in a perpetual
manner. And it needs a considerable population of the impoverished and
unemployed - "a reserve army of labor," as Marx put it - in order to
create a "demand" for labor and thus make such exploitative positions
"competitive" to those who need to partake in them to merely survive. It
needs these things in order to stay intact - something that is
desirable to the85 richest people in the world who own more than half of the world's entire population (3.6 billion people).

But wealth accumulation through alienation and exploitation is not
enough in itself. The system also needs to create scarcity where it does
not already exist. Even Marx admitted that capitalism has given us the
productive capacity to provide all that is needed for the global
population. In other words, capitalism has proven that scarcity does not
exist. And, over the years, technology has confirmed this. But, in
order for capitalism to survive, scarcity must exist, even if through
artificial means. This is a necessary component on multiple fronts,
including the pricing of commodities, the enhancement of wealth, and the
need to inject a high degree of competition among people (who are
naturally inclined to cooperation).
Since capitalism
is based in the buying and selling of commodities,
its lifeblood is production. And since production in a capitalist system
is not based on need, but rather on demand, it has the tendency to
produce more than it can sell. This is called overproduction.

Overproduction is when capitalists produce too much compared to
the demand for things or services. Suddenly capitalists build up stocks
of things they cannot sell, they have factories with too much capacity
compared to demand and they have too many workers than they need. So
they close down plant, slash the workforce and even just liquidate the
whole business. That is a capitalist crisis.

When overproduction occurs, it must be addressed. There are multiple
ways to do this. Marx addressed three options: "On the one hand by
enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by
the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of
the old ones." Another is through the destruction of excess capital and
commodities. Whichever measure is taken, it is paramount that the
economy must emerge
from a starting point that is different from the ending point where the
crisis began. This is accomplished through creating scarcity, whether
in regards to labor, production capacity, or commodities and basic
needs.

Maintaining scarcity is also necessary for wealth enhancement. It is
not enough that accumulation flows to a very small section of the
population, but more so that a considerable portion of the population is
faced with the inherent struggles related to inaccessibility. For
example, if millions of people are unable to access basic needs such as
food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare, the commodification of those
needs becomes all the more effective. On the flip side, the mere
presence of accessibility - or wealth - which is enjoyed by the elite
becomes all the more valuable because it is highly sought after.
In this sense, it is not the accumulation of personal wealth that
creates advantageous positions on the socioeconomic ladder; it's the
impoverishment of the majority. Allowing human beings access to basic
necessities would essentially destroy the allure (and thus, power) of
wealth and the coercive nature of forced participation. This effect is
maintained through artificial scarcity - the coordinated withholding of
basic needs from the majority. These measures also seek to create a
predatory landscape where manufactured scarcity pits poor against poor
and worker against worker.

Control through Commodification

A crucial part of this process is commodification - the
"transformation of goods and services, as well as ideas or other
entities that normally may not be considered goods, into commodities"
that can be bought, sold, used and discarded. The most important
transformation is that of the working-class majority who, without the
means to sustain on their own, are left with a choice between (1)
laboring to create wealth for a small minority and accepting whatever
"wages" are provided, or (2) starving.

In The Socioeconomic Guardians of Scarcity, Philip Richlin tells us that:

"When society deprives any community or individual of the
necessities of life, there is a form of violence happening. When society
commodifies the bare necessities of life, they are commodifying human
beings, whose labor can be bought and sold. Underneath the
pseudo-philosophical rationalizations for capitalism is a defense of
wage slavery. For, if your labor is for sale, then you are for sale."

We are for sale, and we sell ourselves everyday - in the hopes of
acquiring a wage that allows us to eat, sleep, and feed our families. In
the United States, the 46 million people living in poverty haven't been
so lucky. The 2.5 million who have defaulted on their student loans
have been discarded. The 49 million who suffer from food insecurity have
lost hope. The 3.5 million homeless are mocked by 18.6 million vacant
homes. And the 22 million who are unemployed or underemployed have been
deemed "unfit commodities" and relegated to the reserve army of labor.

The control aspect of the commodification of labor comes in its
dehumanizing effect - an effect that was commonly recognized among 18th
and 19th century thinkers. One of those thinkers, Wilhelm Von Humboldt,
when referring to the role of a wage laborer, explained "as whatever
does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of
instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does
not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical
exactness, suggesting that "we may admire what he (the laborer) does,
but we despise what he is," because he is essentially not human.
The worker, in her or his role in the capital-labor relationship,
exists in a position of constant degeneration. This is especially true
with the onset of mass production lines and the division of labor - both
of which are inevitable elements within this system. "As the division
of labor increases, labor is simplified," Marx tells us. "The special
skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a
simple, monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense
bodily or intellectual faculties. His labor becomes a labor that anyone
can perform." As automation and technology progress, such specialized
task-mastering even seeps into what was once considered "skilled" labor,
thus broadening its reach.
In this role, workers are firmly placed into positions of control within a highly authoritative and hierarchical system.

A World beyond Profit

Dystopian narratives are no longer fiction. From birth, we are
corralled into a system that scoffs at free will, stymies our creative
and productive capacities, and leaves us little room to carve our own
paths.
Another world is not just possible; it is inevitable if we are to exist in the long-term. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin offers a glimpse into this world not constructed on labor, profit, and artificial scarcity:

"It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when a rationally
organized economy could automatically manufacture small "packaged"
factories without human labor; parts could be produced with so little
effort that most maintenance tasks would be reduced to the simple act of
removing a defective unit from a machine and replacing it by another-a
job no more difficult than pulling out and putting in a tray. Machines
would make and repair most of the machines required to maintain such a
highly industrialized economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely
toward human needs and freed from all consideration of profit and loss,
would eliminate the pain of want and toil-the penalty, inflicted in the
form of denial, suffering and inhumanity, exacted by a society based on
scarcity and labor."

Amidst the best-of-2014 lists seeking to burnish a pretty dark year, we should find a place for the barn-burning speech by 85-year-old novelist Ursula Le Guin at the National Book Awards, where she accepted a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for her decades of Marxist, feminist, gender-bending, capitalism-smashing science fiction - most notably The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed
- dubbed by some admirers the anti-Ayn-Rand of literature.

Slamming the
current reality of "a profiteer (trying) to punish a publisher for
disobedience, writers threatened by corporate fatwa, (and writers)
letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant," she suggested,
"Hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers
who can see alternatives to how we live now...We will need writers who
can remember freedom."

"Books, you know, they’re not just commodities. The profit motive
often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its
power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human
power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change
often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words...We who
live by writing and publishing want—and should demand—our fair share of
the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its
name is freedom."

A socialist system will embrace technology, but with the profit motive removed emphasis will be first and foremost on safety for both people and planet. There will be no headlong rush by corporations, no pressure from lobbyists, but a rational appraisalof what's necessary, desirable and acceptable. Whether food, fuel, medicines, rare earth metals or any resource required for production priority will be given to firm democratic decisions based on the precautionary principle. Do no harm.

A
monstrous cloud of accumulated methane—a potent greenhouse gas—is now
hovering over a large portion of the western United States according to
satellite imagery analyzed by NASA and reported by the Washington Post.
Created by years of intentionally released and errantly leaked
natural gas during fossil fuel drilling operations, the cloud—invisible
to the human eye but captured by advanced satellite imaging
technology—is centered over northwest New Mexico and described by the Post
as "a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud, so vast that scientists
questioned their own data when they first studied it three years ago."

So alarmed by the size of the plume were scientists, NASA researcher Christian Frankenberg told the Post, "We couldn’t be sure that the signal was real."
Though there is considerably less of it put into the atmosphere each
year, methane is twenty times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than
carbon-dioxide or CO2.

The accumulation of methane is not a new problem, but one that
appears to be worsening as hydraulic fracture drilling (or fracking) and
other intensive fossil fuel extraction operations continue to soar in
the southwest region of the country. The latest NASA analysis of the
phenomenon put the approximate "average extent of the gas plume over the
past decade at 2,500 square miles." Frankenberg pointed out that this
estimate pre-dates the most recent gas and oil drilling boom now
underway in the southwest.

Though the industry has longed ignored the dangers of so-called gas
"flaring"—in which excess methane is simply burned off during oil and
gas drilling or processing—environmenalists and climate scientists have
long been sounding the alarm about methane's impact when it comes to
global warming and other ecological hazards. And though natural gas has
been heralded as a cleaner alternative to coal, numerous studies have
shown that though gas burns cleaner than coal, the ability of gas to
escape during extraction and transportation, the cumulative greenhouse
impact could be equal or worse than coal.

The richest people on Earth got richer in 2014, adding US$92
billion. The net worth of the world's 400 wealthiest billionaires as of
yesterday stood at US$4.1 trillion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires
Index, a daily ranking system.

The biggest gainer was Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba
Group, China's biggest e-commerce company. Ma added US$25.1 billion to his
fortune, riding a 56 per cent surge in Alibaba's shares since its September
initial public offering.

In 1848 John J. Astor, a merchant trader, was America’s
richest man with $20m (now $545m). By the time the United States entered the
first world war, John D. Rockefeller had become its first billionaire. When he
died in 1992, Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, was probably America’s
richest man with $8 billion.

Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, added US$13.7
billion to his net worth after the Nebraska-based company soared 28 per cent as
the dozens of operating businesses the 84-year-old chairman bought over the
past five decades churned out record profit. Buffett passed Mexican
telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim on December 5 to become the world's
second-richest person.

Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, the world's largest
social networking company, gained US$10.6 billion as the California-based
business rose to a record on December 22. This year Facebook's mobile business
has flourished and its acquisition of Instagram in 2012 for US$1 billion has
also been paying off: a Citigroup analyst said this month that the photo
sharing app is worth US$35 billion.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates was up US$9.1 billion during
the year. The 59-year-old remains the world's richest person with a US$87.6
billion fortune.

Politics is both necessary to business and irresistible to
the self-important. A growing number of robber barons and their children went
into politics themselves. Two of Rockefeller’s children became governors—Nelson
of New York and Winthrop of Arkansas—and Nelson went on to be Gerald Ford’s
vice-president. The Senate was known as “the millionaire’s club”. Robber barons
bought newspapers.eg Ford. Now Google’s political action committee spent more
on campaigns than Goldman Sachs, a company legendary for its political
connections. Zuckerberg has founded a pressure group, fwd.us, to push for
immigration reform. The group’s head boasts that the tech industry will become “one
of the most powerful political forces” because “we control massive distribution
channels, both as companies and as individuals”. These “channels” include
old-media redoubts such as the Washington Post (bought by Bezos) and the New
Republic (bought by Facebook’s Chris Hughes) as well as new media empires such
as Yahoo. Silicon Valley is now a regular stop in fundraising and an
established part of America’s revolving-door culture. Al Gore, a former
vice-president, has been a senior adviser to Google. Sheryl Sandberg,
Facebook’s chief operating officer, started her career as chief of staff to
Larry Summers when he was treasury secretary. Meanwhile through his
philanthropy and his charity foundation, Gates determines various governments
policy throughout Africa.

A tradition for the Scottish Hogmanay is to bring a lump of coal when first-footing to signify that the house will keep warm, bring
comfort and be safe for coming New Year. Sadly like many of the old ways, modern
times no longer give the symbolism any positive meaning.

Experts warn coal use is growing unsustainably and coal
prices are likely to stay low over the next five years, according to the
International Energy Agency. Coal will likely overtake oil as the dominant energy
source by 2017, and without a major shift away from coal, average global
temperatures could rise by 6 degrees Celsius by 2050, leading to devastating
climate change. It forecasts rising demand for the cheap fuel from India and
other Asian countries, with global coal use on an upwards march to hit a record
9 billion tonnes by 2019. Burning coal emits soot, mercury, sulphur dioxide and
nitrous oxides – pollutants that are associated with lung and heart disease
that threatens to cause needless deaths and rampant greenhouse gas emissions
unless the international community backs low carbon development, experts
warned. Coal-fired power plants account for just 40% of global electricity
production, but they are responsible for more than 70% of its emissions. “We
have heard many pledges and policies aimed at mitigating climate change, but
over the next five years they will mostly fail to arrest the growth in coal
demand,” said IEA chief Maria van der Hoeven. He stressed that despite its
“undeniable” contribution to energy access, coal use was “simply unsustainable”
in its current form.

On December 30th, 1999, the FTSE 100 index of the UK's
biggest companies hit its highest closing level ever. Despite two stock market crashes (the IT crash and the global financial
crisis), the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and a euro crisis , on average, shares in the FTSE 100 yield about 3%
a year, which is comfortably better than the best cash ISA, even allowing for
tax free interest

Even if the capital value of some shares in the index may
have declined over the last 15 years, its dividends have grown healthily. The
equity market has delivered significant returns ahead of inflation for long
term investors.

"Despite the FTSE 100 remaining below the level it
achieved in 1999, the vast majority of investors should have made money over
this 15-year period," says Rebecca O'Keeffe, head of investment at
Interactive Investor. She estimates that anyone reinvesting dividends would
have generated an overall return of 60% since 1999. Others put the figure at
nearer 80%.

HSBC shares have fallen by 15% since 1999, but dividends
have produced an overall return of 64%.

Even if someone who
invested £10,000 in the FTSE 100 at the worst moment, on 30 December 1999,
would now be sitting on more than £15,000 with income reinvested, according to
Laith Khalaf, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. Someone investing
£10,000 in a FTSE 250 tracker in 1999 would have more than doubled their money
to £23,000 over the period. If they had reinvested the dividends, they would
have more than tripled their money, to £36,000.

Over half of U.S. corporate foreign profits are now being held in tax havens, double the share of just twenty years ago. Corporations are stealing from the nation that made them rich.

There are many examples of greed among individual firms. Based
largely on 2014 SEC documents submitted by the companies themselves:

---Exxon has almost 80% of its productive oil and gas wells in the U.S. but declared only 17% of its income here. The company used a theoretical tax to account for 83% of last year's income tax bill, and paid less than 2% of its total income in current U.S. taxes.

---Chevron
has about 75% of its oil and gas wells and almost 90% of its pipeline
mileage in the United States, yet the company claimed only 13% of last
year's income in the U.S., and paid almost nothing (less than 1/10 of 1%) in current U.S. taxes.

---Pfizer had 40% of last year's sales in the U.S., but claimed losses in the U.S. and $17 billion in profits overseas.

---Bank of America, despite making 84% of its 2011-2013 revenue in the U.S., declared just 31% of its profits in the United States.

---Citigroup had 43% of its 2011-2013 revenue in North America but declared less than 3% of its profits in the United States.

---Apple still does most of its product and research development in the United States. Yet the company moved
$30 billion in profits to an Irish subsidiary with no employees, with
loopholes in place to avoid establishing residency in any country. The
subsidiary files no returns and pays no taxes. Apple CEO Tim Cook said,
"We pay all the taxes we owe."

---Google's business is based
on the Internet, the Digital Library Initiative, and the geographical
database of the U.S. Census Bureau. Yet the company has gained recognition as one of the world's biggest tax avoiders.

So, cages now to prevent access to benches by homeless, alcoholics and drug dealers. Is this one step better or worse than putting them in cages? Our societies have developed over many years in response to conditions thrust upon them by powerful decision makers. It becomes more and more apparent that now certain sections of that public can be denied even the privilege of being recognised as having the status of humankind.

Following on from this earlier post about the US prison system the one below discusses international impacts:

Above photo: Prison in Colombia.

Where else will you hear about US
prison imperialism besides from the Alliance for Global Justice? Simply
put, there is no other organization that has as thoroughly researched
and exposed these programs than AfGJ.Did you know that the US government has
been exporting its style of mass incarceration to at least 25 other
countries–what we call “prison imperialism”?

These efforts began in 2000
with the Program for the Improvement of the Colombian Prison System. Since
then, US involvement in foreign prison systems has spread
to Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, Mexico, Honduras and around
the world. It is closely related to other efforts to militarize police
and international borders. These are replications of US models of
crowd suppression, police brutality and racial profiling; border
zones transformed into marshal law zones; and mass incarceration.

AfGJ understands implicitly that police
brutality and racial profiling in Ferguson is intimately related to CIA
torture programs and police repression around the world. We understand
that the struggle against militarized borders in the US is just one side
of an international struggle. And we can see that spreading mass
incarceration around the world serves no one except the free traders and
profit warriors and police state repressors.

Indeed, wherever the US has neoliberal, free
trade agreements, it is also building new jails and/or restructuring the
entire prison system. These prisons help uphold and maintain the US
empire. Prison Imperialism is not about fighting crime–it’s about social
control and repression of dissent. In the US, crime rates have gone
down since the 1970s, but prison populations have skyrocketed by over
700%. In Mexico, the US funded prisons aren’t about incarcerating big
time narco-traffickers. Most the imprisoned are there for
“victimless crimes”. In Colombia, US involvement in the prison system
was justified as a way to alleviate overcrowding. But today,
overcrowding is at an all time high and there has been a big spike in
political arrests and reports of torture.

The TUC is warning that workers will have to wait until 2024
before they make up lost ground and see their pay recover to pre-crisis levels.

TUC research says the real value of the average full-time
employee wage fell by £487 in 2014 and has fallen by £2,509 since 2010 – a
decline of about £50 a week.

Frances O’Grady, the TUC’s general secretary, said: “What is
clear is that it will take a decade for wages to catch up in real terms to
where they were before the crash. There are a lot of people who are now dipping
into their savings – or, worse, getting into debt, to try to maintain a
standard of living.”

According to the government’s independent forecaster, the
Office for Budget Responsibility, George Osborne’s economic plans mean “a very
sharp spending squeeze”, with 60% of the cuts to fall in the next parliament. Osborne’s
hopes to cut government spending to levels last seen in the 1930s. O’Grady
said. “This is really punishing the poor.”

Dostoevsky said, "The degree of civilization in a
society can be judged by entering its prisons"

The political journalist Chris Hedges has written a biting
criticism of the American prison industry. The US prison-industrial complex,
holds 2.3 million prisoners, or 25 percent of the world’s prison population, and
from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, makes
money by keeping prisons full. He writes “Prisons are a grotesque manifestation
of corporate capitalism. Slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment
of the U.S. Constitution. It reads: ‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,
except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, shall exist within the United States. …, And the massive U.S. prison
industry functions like the forced labor camps that have existed in all
totalitarian states.”

Other extracts worth quoting are

“Prisons employ and exploit the ideal worker. Prisoners do
not receive benefits or pensions. They are not paid overtime. They are
forbidden to organize and strike. They must show up on time. They are not paid
for sick days or granted vacations. They cannot formally complain about working
conditions or safety hazards. If they are disobedient, or attempt to protest
their pitiful wages, they lose their jobs and can be sent to isolation cells.
The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government
industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate
state expects us all to become…The wages paid to prisoners for labor inside
prisons have remained stagnant and in real terms have declined over the past
three decades. In New Jersey a prisoner made $1.20 for eight hours of work—yes,
eight hours of work—in 1980 and today makes $1.30 for a day’s labor. Prisoners earn,
on average, $28 a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons earn as
little as 17 cents an hour. However, items for sale in prison commissaries have
risen in price over the past two decades by as much as 100 percent. And new
rules in some prisons, including those in New Jersey, prohibit families to send
packages to prisoners, forcing prisoners to rely exclusively on prison vendors….

…States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing
prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets and even toilet
paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board….

Debt peonage inside prison is as prevalent as it is outside
prison…. there is a 10 percent charge imposed by New Jersey on every commissary
purchase. Stamps have a 10 percent surcharge. Prisoners must pay the state for
a 15-minute deathbed visit to an immediate family member or a 15-minute visit
to a funeral home to view the deceased. New Jersey, like most other states,
forces a prisoner to reimburse the system for overtime wages paid to the two
guards who accompany him or her, plus mileage cost. The charge can be as high
as $945.04. It can take years to pay off a visit with a dying father or mother.

Fines, often in the thousands of dollars, are assessed
against many prisoners when they are sentenced. There are 22 fines that can be
imposed in New Jersey, including the Violent Crime Compensation Assessment
(VCCB), the Law Enforcement Officers Training & Equipment Fund (LEOT) and
Extradition Costs (EXTRA). The state takes a percentage each month out of
prison pay to pay down the fines, a process that can take decades. If a
prisoner who is fined $10,000 at sentencing must rely solely on a prison salary
he or she will owe about $4,000 after making payments for 25 years. Prisoners
can leave prison in debt to the state. And if they cannot continue to make
regular payments—difficult because of high unemployment—they are sent back to
prison….

…The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an
estimated $45 million over a recent 10-year period for lobbying that is keeping
the prison business flush. The resource center In the Public Interest
documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’
Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison
companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of
90 percent. If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations
for the empty beds…

…Corporations have privatized most of the prison functions
once handled by governments. They run prison commissaries and, since the
prisoners have nowhere else to shop, often jack up prices by as much as 100
percent. Corporations have taken over the phone systems and charge exorbitant
fees to prisoners and their families. They grossly overcharge for money
transfers from families to prisoners. And these corporations, some of the
nation’s largest, pay little more than a dollar a day to prison laborers who
work in for-profit prison industries. Food and merchandise vendors,
construction companies, laundry services, uniforms companies, prison equipment
vendors, cafeteria services, manufacturers of pepper spray, body armor and the
array of medieval instruments used for the physical control of prisoners, and a
host of other contractors feed like jackals off prisons. Prisons, in America,
are a hugely profitable business….for-profit companies presently control about
18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. Private
prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons. And nearly half of all
immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons…

…Whole industries now rely almost exclusively on prison
labor. Federal prisoners, who are among the highest paid in the U.S. system,
making as much as $1.25 an hour, produce the military’s helmets, uniforms,
pants, shirts, ammunition belts, ID tags and tents. Prisoners work, often
through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of
America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s
Secret, J.C. Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Procter
& Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola, Caterpillar,
Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honeywell,
Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin and Target.
Prisoners in some states run dairy farms, staff call centers, take hotel
reservations or work in slaughterhouses. And prisoners are used to carry out
public services such as collecting highway trash in states such as Ohio…”

Monday, December 29, 2014

“Don’t blame population growth: We have enough resources for
everyone if we choose to distribute things better. We already grow enough food
for over 10 billion people, we just waste 30%, and feed large chunks to our
cars, power stations and livestock.”Duncan Williamson, food policy manager,
WWF UK

How we produce and consume food has a bigger impact on peoples’
well-being than any other human activity. The food industry is the largest
sector of the economy; food touches everything from our health to the environment,
climate change and economic inequality. Every year two million people die from
unsafe food and water around the world. Food safety experts warn these deaths
may be caused by human design, and nowhere is this trend more prevalent than in
China.

An interesting article by Peter Gelderloos about the recent
police shootings and brutality in America which provides a refreshing viewpoint
that many socialists share and worth quoting extracts from.

“We don’t want better police. We don’t want to fix the
police. On the contrary, we understand that the police work quite well; they
simply do not work for us and they never have. We want to get rid of the police
entirely, and we want to live in a world where police are not necessary…

…The police are not an instrument fit to protect a society;
on the contrary they are an instrument fit to protect an elite, parasitical
class from society….

….We can’t get rid of police brutality without getting rid
of the police, and we can’t get rid of the police without getting rid of an
entire system based on exploitation, oppression, and hierarchy. There is no
easy, band-aid solution to this problem, and bandying them about only
perpetuates the problem….

…If we assert that it is not permitted to speak of a world
without police, this is only true if we understand the police as one function
in an interlocking system of domination, and the abolition of the police means
the abolition of that entire system….

…We need more people who are talking about a world without
prisons….

…Fighting back against the police, especially shooting back
at them, as was happening in Ferguson, is not a safe activity. Change is never
safe. And if we can successfully overcome the police to create a liberated
zone, the State will eventually send in the military….It is understandable that
many people would not want to face the extreme risks involved with uprooting
the oppressions that grip our society. There is nothing wrong with being
afraid, so long as you have the courage to admit it….”

The essay concludes:

“In the streets, we need to learn how to seize space, to
make sure that those who fight back are never isolated, to make collective
responses possible so no one has to react in an individual, suicidal way again,
and to build a struggle that has room for young and old, for the peaceful and
the bellicose, for those who know how to fight and those who know how to heal.
It will be a long process, and in the meantime, there is a great need to speak
loud and clear about a world without police, so everyone will know there is
another way, beyond the false alternatives of obedience or ineffectual reform.”

One in 10 UK families see one earner's wages used solely to cover childcare and commuting costs, research has suggested. 43% of parents with children aged up to five said they used childcare to enable them to go back to work.

The Family and Childcare Trust has calculated that the cost of childcare in the UK was £11,700 for an average family with one child in full-time nursery and one child in an afterschool club. The Aviva survey of 2,000 parents with children aged up to five suggested the median average wage left by the lower earner's family was £243 a month. This was after the cost of childcare, commuting, work-wear and work-related equipment.

"Our findings paint a picture of a nation of parents struggling to keep their heads, and careers, above water in the face of rising childcare costs," said Louise Colley, protection director at Aviva.

According to data on Material Deprivation published by the
European Commission, Ireland comes in at number three on the list of most
deprived countries in the EU-15 – just after Greece and Italy. This means that
one million people, or 28 percent of the Irish population, struggle to provide
themselves with heat, shelter, food and bills. 600,000 people are living in
food poverty. Food banks are popping up everywhere.

Valerie Cummins in a small corner of Dublin's run down north
inner city works for Crosscare, a social support agency in Dublin that set up
Ireland's first community food banks. She said "Right now, demand is so high we can't
keep up. People are dropping in all the time asking for emergency parcels to
get them through the next few days. I've been working with Crosscare for 25
years and I have never seen things so bad. People are more desperate than
ever."

Rose Sinclair-Doyle and mum of two from Tallaght, south
Dublin recently started to use the new community food bank to feed her family.
"People never think it could happen to them," she said. "I've
been living under austerity for years, but it was only when my daughter moved
back home with her two kids that the money just couldn't stretch to feed us
all. I'm ashamed going in, but I need food," she said. "It's not an
easy thing to do, but after I split from my partner I was left alone with the
mortgage repayments. I don't get fuel allowance, so I have to think about heating
my house, paying for electricity... it's so hard. " Rose added: "When
I lived alone, I was able to stock up. Things were tight, but I could manage. I
would always have that point where there'd be a bill I couldn't pay, but I got
by until I was suddenly responsible for putting food on the table for four
people. Then I had to get help. It just takes one thing to push you to the
breadline, and that's where we are in Ireland right now."

Rose isn't alone. Students, the unemployed, people on low
incomes and those who racked up massive debt during the economic boom are now
starting to depend on Ireland's new community food banks to feed their
families.

Brian Leech from the Anti Austerity Alliance in Tallaght,
south Dublin told me the community food banks are drawing in Ireland's
"new poor" who cannot manage from pay-cheque to pay-cheque explained "Initially it was just people on benefits
or low income who ran out of money at the end of the month. Now that's trickled
down to middle income earners who are totally lost," he said. "The
banks threw money at people during the boom, and now people are trying to pay
it all back and feed their families. No one wants food banks, but people have
to eat and the government isn't helping hungry people." Brian Leech feels
that, in accepting help, we cannot overlook the root causes of poverty.
"People need better lives, more income equality and jobs. The food banks
are very important now, but we should all want a better future. We can't lose
sight of the issues that are forcing people to go to food banks and forcing
their very existence."

Valerie Cummins also referred to "new poor".
"A man came in here last week. He drove up in a white van, was well
dressed and well spoken," she said. "I could tell he was embarrassed,
so I brought him into the office. He said he works full time but after bills
that day he was left with €15 to feed his family for the week. He said his wife
would die of shame if she knew he went to a food bank. Even though it's against
policy, I put together an emergency parcel that will last him three days. I
might never see him again – he's part of Ireland's new invisible poor, eking it
out week to week. We shouldn't live in a world with food banks, but what can
you do when people in here are hungry?"

The Afro-Brazilian Quilombola people were forced from
their land in Brazil in order to make way for eucalyptus plantations,
which produce toilet paper destined for Western markets. But they are
resisting by replanting native trees and food crops, and working for a
post-eucalyptus reality.

The principal use for the cellulose found in eucalyptus plants in
Brazil is disposable paper products, such as toilet paper and paper
towels - products most in demand in first-world markets. Yet these types
of paper products generate social and environmental impacts in places
in Brazil where many communities have never even had access to them.

According to economist Helder Gomes, a member of the Alert Against
the Green Desert Network, in the 1960s, international markets were under
pressure due to increased demand for pulp and paper and the difficulty
of widening production in countries where eucalyptus had traditionally
been produced. "In the 1960s, studies done by the FAO [UN Food and
Agriculture Organization] indicated the difficulty of expanding
production in producing countries, due to the availability of land in
central countries, the long period of maturation and the pressure from
social movements against the rise in contaminating emissions and against
the expansion of monocultures."
This forced international bodies, such as the FAO itself, Gomes said,
to begin subsidizing the expansion of forestry programs in countries
like Brazil, where there were favorable ecological conditions for the
rapid growth of forests, available land, an abundance of cheap labor,
and government policies that would benefit and support the industry.

"There were monoculture plantations in unlikely places, near springs
and in zones where aquifers are replenished. The forests along the
riverbank were cut down; the path of the water was cut off; lakes were
filled in with dirt - and the biodiversity of the Atlantic forests was
decimated with insecticides and herbicides."

"The World Trade Organization, the World Bank and governments that
promote this system, which only a few multinational corporations benefit
from, are causing an economic genocide and destroying traditional
agriculture, and this means the destruction of entire towns and
communities."

"Of the 40 indigenous communities that existed during the first years of this industry, only six remained."

"What we are doing here is what our ancestors did. They fled from
conditions of slavery and created conditions for life in isolated
places. They opened clearings and produced from the earth."

"Perhaps in 100 years, a Quilombola individual will look at the
eucalyptus plantation and say that it is a forest, because he won't have
the reference of what a native forest is. The cellulose company knows
that if this memory is broken, there will be no more problems with
resistance."

According to Sebastiao Pinheiro, agronomist and professor at the Rio
Grande do Sul University, eucalyptus plantations do not generate
employment; they actually destroy the source of employment for thousands
of families. "The green deserts do not create jobs. Four hundred
hectares of eucalyptus would be required to create one job. In family or
small-scale agriculture, 10 people are required for one hectare. The
World Trade Organization, the World Bank and governments that promote
this system, which only a few multinational corporations benefit from,
are causing an economic genocide and destroying traditional agriculture,
and this means the destruction of entire towns and communities."

Minnesotans protesting police violence and institutional racism could
face "staggering" fees and criminal charges for a protest at Mall of
America, with the City of Bloomington announcing plans to force
organizers to pay for the mall's lost revenue during the exercise of
their free speech rights, highlighting important questions about free
speech in an era of privatized public spaces.

"Youth leaders of color [are] under attack," Black Lives Matter-Minnesota said in a statement.
"It’s clear that the Bloomington City government, at the behest of one
of the largest centers of commerce in the country, hopes to set a
precedent that will stifle dissent and instill fear into young people of
color and allies who refuse to watch their brothers and sisters get
gunned down in the streets with no consequences."

Around 3,000 people flooded the mall on Saturday, December 20, to
sing carols and chants following police killings of unarmed
African-American men like Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and
Dontre Hamilton. The protests were peaceful, and some mall workers
stepped outside of their businesses and raised their hands in
support. Police closed around 80 stores during the two-and-a-half hour
protests, and locked down several mall entrances.
Days after the action, Bloomington City Attorney Sandra Johnson announced
that she will not only seek criminal trespass and unlawful assembly
charges against the protesters, but will also seek to have them pay for
the mall's lost revenue and overtime for police officers--a cost that
she says will be "staggering."

Can the Mall of America prohibit the exercise of free speech and
assembly on its premises? And can it pick-and-choose who it allows to
assemble? Last year, for example,the Mall allowed around 7,000 people to gather in the same rotunda to honor a young white man who died of cancer.
The First Amendment protects against government suppression of
speech, but not private responses to the exercise of free speech and
expression. And the Mall of America is considered private property,
despite receiving hundreds of millions in public subsidies since it was built, including an additional $250 million approved last year.

For decades, courts have struggled with how to protect free speech in public forums that have grown increasingly privatized.
In many communities, town squares and downtown business districts
have largely been replaced by privately-owned shopping malls,
particularly in suburban areas. In Bloomington, Minnesota, for example,
there is no public space that offers the same level of visibility as a
protest at the Mall of America--which is why protesters chose the
location on December 20.
Even traditional public spaces like parks are increasingly owned
by private entities, most famously in New York's Zuccotti Park, where
Occupy Wall Street was born, and where Occupiers faced eviction after
the park's owners changed the rules.
Mall of America's status as a public space under the Minnesota state
constitution was challenged in the 1990s by anti-fur activists who
wanted to protest outside Macy's. A Minnesota trial court
initially found that, thanks to the Mall's substantial public subsidies,
the Mall of America was "born of a union with government" and could
only impose reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on protest.
The Minnesota Supreme Court, though, reversed the lower court in 1998 and declared that
the state constitution's protection of free speech "does not apply to a
privately owned shopping center such as the Mall of America, although
developed in part with public financing."

In recent years, the First Amendment has undergone a revolution in the U.S. Supreme Court--in cases like Citizens United, Hobby Lobby, and McCutcheon--but largely
in favor of expanding the "free speech rights" of corporations and the
wealthy few, rather than protecting what Justice Hugo Black described in
1945 as "the poorly financed causes of little people." When average
Americans raise their voices in protest, they can still be muffled by
corporate interests.

Real per capita GDP was $25,427 in 1974 (in 2009 U.S.
dollars) and now it is almost double that at $49,810. If per capita GDP nearly
doubled surely that would mean that everyone’s income had nearly doubled.
That’s not what happened.

Instead, those at the top of the income distribution have
vastly more income than 40 years ago while those at the bottom have less. The
real income of a household at the 20th percentile (above 20% of all households
in the income ranking) has scarcely budged since 1974—it was $20,000 and change
then and is a bit over $20,000 now.

For those below the 20th percentile, real income has fallen.
The entire bottom 80% of households ranked by income now gets only 49% of the
national pie, down from 57% in 1974. That means that the top 20% has gone from
43% to 51% of total income.

Even within the top
20%, the distribution skews upward. Most of the income gains of the top 20% are
concentrated in the top 5%; most of the gains of the top 5% are concentrated in
the top 1%; most of the gains in the top 1% are concentrated in the top 0.1%.

More people are working, but the share of national income
that goes to ordinary workers is smaller. The labor force participation rate
passed 61% in 1974 and peaked at 67% in the late 1990s. Labor force
participation has drifted back downward somewhat since then through a
combination of baby boomer retirement and discouraged workers giving up on the
labor force since the crisis that began in 2007, but it remains at 63%, still
higher than in 1974. That means that even while more of us are participating in
market work, the market is concentrating its rewards in a shrinking cabal of
increasingly powerful hands.

One category of income—wages and salaries earned in return
for work—is labor income. The other categories—profit, dividends, rent,
interest—are all forms of income that result from owning (and extracted
according to the Marxists from the workers surplus labor.) For many decades,
the labor share of national income held fairly steady, but beginning in the
mid-1970s it started falling.Economist James Heintz found that the share of the
national income earned as private-business-sector wages (excluding executive
compensation) fell from 58% in 1970 to 50% in 2010; the share that went to
non-supervisory workers fell from 45% to 31%. Even as hourly pay for a broad
swath of people in the middle—between the 20th and 80th percentiles—has just
about kept pace with inflation. Rising costs of higher education and housing
have consigned many to a near-permanent state of debt peonage. College tuitions
have risen more than three times as fast as inflation since 1974. The total
volume of outstanding student debt has passed $1 trillion—greater than even the
volume of outstanding credit card debt. Housing, too, has become more
unaffordable. Within recent decades, however, home prices have risen faster
than median incomes and deceptive lending practices trapped many home-buyers in
unaffordable mortgages. For those who were lucky, and bought and sold at the
right times, the housing bubble was a windfall. For many more, the home has
become a millstone of debt and the threat of foreclose has rendered shelter
uncertain.

Workers on short-term contracts and the self-employed, whose
income is also unpredictable, add up to 30% of the U.S. workforce with
uncertain, episodic income. The mid-1970s poverty rate had fallen to 11%, but
the reduction was not sustained. Since then, the poverty rate has fluctuated
between 11% and 15% with no consistent long-term trend. Today, we are in a high
poverty phase: somewhere in the neighborhood of 15% of the population is living
in poverty during any given month. While most spells of poverty last well under
a year (6.6 months is the median), a large minority of the population cycles in
and out of poverty. From January 2009 to December 2011, 31.6% of the population
spent at least two consecutive months below the poverty line.

Families can fall into poverty for a number of reasons. Loss
of employment, certainly, is a major cause. Health problems are a trigger for
economic distress. Medical bills are the number-one cause of personal
bankruptcy; even those who have health insurance may be unable to pay for their
medical care. Insecurity is our constant companion.

The inequities of the labor market have divided us into two
categories—the overworked and the underemployed. For those with consistent
employment, the work is often too much work. Even as output per worker hour
rises—meaning that, as a society we could increase our material standard of
living while holding leisure time steady, or hold our material standard of
living steady while increasing leisure time, we have instead increased average
work hours per year. Hours of paid labor per employee were about the same in
2000 as in 1973, but since more people were in the paid labor force, the
average number of hours per working age person rose from 1,217 to 1,396,
equivalent to a full extra month of forty-hour workweeks. One consequence is
that we have a leisure shortage. Chronic sleep deprivation has become the norm.
According to a study by the National Academy of Sciences, Americans’ average
amount of sleep fell by 20% over the course of the 20th century. Meanwhile, the
unemployed and underemployed have hours on their hands that they either spend
job hunting, in the endless sequence of bureaucratic tasks necessary to access
the meager benefits available through the threadbare social safety net, or
idle, their unclaimed hours more a burden than a gift. The supposed benefit of
unemployment—leisure time to mitigate the loss of income—is not in evidence in
the subjective well-being of the unemployed, who are more likely to suffer
depression and family stress.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild was already noting in her
research during the 1980s that dual- income households were giving up leisure
or letting the standards of housework and at-home caregiving slip—often a mix
of both. When a stay-at-home mother goes out to work for pay and reduces her
hours of home production, the household’s increase in cash income gets added to
GDP but the household’s loss of unpaid labor time is not subtracted. Or, if she
hires a housecleaning service and a babysitter, the wages earned by the mother,
the housecleaner, and the babysitter all get added to GDP, but the work done by
the housecleaner and babysitter are substituting for unpaid work that was
already being done. Correcting for the loss of home production that has
accompanied the rise in female participation in the paid labor force requires
us to revise downward the increase in output over the period 1959-2004—the
largest hit came between 1959 and 1972 with the withdrawal of about 500 hours
of household labor per year, a reduction of almost 20%.

The probability that a person who starts out in the bottom
income quintile will make it into the top quintile has stayed remarkably
constant since the mid twentieth century. A child born in the bottom quintile
in 1971 had an 8.4% chance of making it to the top quintile; for a child born
in 1986, the probability is 9.0%. Despite the national mythology of the
American Dream, mobility is lower in the United States than in other comparably
developed economies. The war on drugs and other “get tough on crime” policies
really mean the mass incarceration of black men. “Welfare reform” withdrew much
of whatever limited support there was for the intense labor—mostly women’s—of
raising children with minimal cash resources.

The insecurity of the average family today is one of
gigantic proportions as they witness before their own eyes the systematic
destruction of all hopes for a better life by policies designed only to enrich
a few at the expense of the many. Unable to understand this process and in the
absence of organised resistance many have resigned themselves to their fate or
sought refuge in the false but comfortable world of religion or right-wing
ideology. The sheer scale of global finance conjures up an awe among many human
beings that was once upon a time reserved only for the giant forces of Nature.
And in a world where money mysteriously appears in some lives and disappears
from others it is difficult not to become superstitious. It is not accidental
therefore that bankers and speculators are often dubbed as 'wizards' by the
media and have become the new high
priests of our societies and their profession described as voodoo economics. Go
through the classifieds section of any newspaper and you will find outfits
peddling everything from astrology, numerology, feng shui, magic crystals side
by side with get-rich-quick finance companies, stock brokers, real estate
agents, investment consultants, wheelers and dealers of every description. New
Age religions join the spiritual world with the commercial world in the business of marketing and selling God.